By William Fellows
IBM Corp’s entire Unix strategy stands at the crossroads. On Monday IBM will mark what it claims will be the biggest RS/6000 announcement since the formation of the division nearly ten years ago by pitching new servers, software and a Linux strategy into a (do or die?) attempt to catch Unix market leader Sun Microsystems Inc. If it doesn’t, then the future of the RS/6000 business as it is constituted must be in jeopardy. At least that’s the impression we were left with.
IBM sources claim that Monday’s so-called Sunscreen announcement will give it performance leadership on 64-bit computing. Products include the Sunblock servers which are the 24-way S80 Condor and four-way H80, both 64-bit ‘Pulsar’ PowerPC systems; 32-bit B50 ‘Pizzazz’ thin server for the ISP market; Power3-based SP nodes which will be offered as a standalone T70 server or clustered Nighthawk node. The emphasis is on servers.
It will also reveal a plan to support Linux applications on AIX 4.3.3 and on the 64-bit version of the Monterey Unix it is creating for IA-64 with Santa Cruz OperationInc. It claims Linux applications will run with only a small recompile. Sun is bound to make much of this as it claims its own version of the lxrun (run Linux) program for Linux applications on Solaris 7 requires no recompiles, and that lxrun in turn is based on work that enables Linux applications to run on SCO UnixWare.
In 1990 IBM claimed it would be the number one or two Unix supplier within five years.
